Irene Cares

Jenny Pool of Mend Counseling Center discusses how people who have long put themselves last can begin reclaiming sovereignty through small, incremental self-care that soothes the nervous system. She explains how abusive dynamics create hypervigilance, anxiety, exhaustion, insomnia, and difficulty trusting calm, and how healing often involves rewiring through safe relationships and co-regulation. T...

Theresa reflects on how her mother’s last year battling cancer became their closest, most joyful time, and shares how 12-step recovery taught her that “you can’t keep what you have unless you give it away” through sponsorship and service. She discusses learning by teaching, the power of words in reshaping identity (choosing “struggle with” over self-labels), and growth through ongoing step work ar...

Theresa reflects on a tough but loving jail counselor who told her the truth and helped shape her recovery, then shares what she wants people still in addiction, abuse, or pain to know: feelings won’t kill you, feelings aren’t facts, and there’s always a way out if you choose it, trust God to provide help, and let someone in. She describes daily freedom as challenging negative self-talk, refusing...

Jenny reflects on learning that marriage and motherhood don’t automatically lead to “happily ever after,” and how divorce, relocating, and painful experiences helped her stop accepting one-sided friendships and value quality over quantity. She discusses weeding out connections that feel convenient, choosing to be alone rather than feel “less than,” and the importance of authenticity, integrity, an...

Theresa shares how her substance use began in seventh grade and escalated into dangerous situations, including flying to pick up drugs and being robbed at gunpoint, until a moment of desperation—asking “God, how am I ever gonna stop?”—was followed by an arrest and jail time that became her turning point. In a confrontational jail program, memories of her brother’s death and the fear of putting her...

How Road Warriors for the Missing Helps Bring Kids Home | Irene Podcast w/ Josh Lancaster Host Dedy interviews Josh Lancaster, co-founder of the volunteer nonprofit Road Warriors for the Missing, about how the group helps families when a child goes missing. Josh explains the organization’s roots, its all-volunteer team (including private investigators), and how they rapidly create and distribute f...

Jenny on Abandonment, Motherhood, and a Narcissistic Marriage Jenny describes growing up not knowing her biological father, taking her stepdad’s last name without explanation, and later trying to contact her real dad—meeting him at 18, confronting him again after becoming a mother, and a final attempt years later—while dealing with lifelong abandonment issues. She recalls a childhood that felt sta...

In part 2 of 3 of this interview, Jenny describes reaching a breaking point in her marriage after repeated drunken, hurtful behavior, and how counseling helped her realize that staying meant accepting it. She explains how having a daughter pushed her to model self-worth and boundaries, then recounts the long-term fallout of divorce: ongoing court fights, being forced out of the family home, and ye...

In the final chapter of April Dawn's story, she opens up about the night she finally left an abusive marriage, the healing gift she was taught to hide, and the relationship with her late daughter Macy that only deepened after loss. This is the part of the story where the healing happens  Reiki, self-love, forgiveness, and the text message that told her everything she needed to know. This is P...

In Part 2 of April's story, she opens up about the seventeen years it took to walk away from addiction, why brutal honesty became the only way out, and how she found compassion even for the people who hurt her most. Then the story turns. April shares what finally broke the cycle of abuse she'd lived in her whole life: the murder of her daughter, Macy. It's the moment that cracked ev...

April shares that 46 years of her life were defined by abuse, trauma, addiction, and eight marriages, shaped by childhood sexual abuse that began at age four and continued into her teens, leaving her believing her only value was sexual. She describes living in survival responses like freeze and fawn, being gaslit throughout her life, and entering relationship after relationship seeking safety for...

Debbie Heisler survived domestic violence at 19. Decades later, it came back into her life in the worst way imaginable when her son David was murdered, two weeks after winning a two year custody battle for his daughter. In this conversation with Hope, Debbie talks about the phone call that came while she was 2,700 miles away, what those first blurred days felt like, and what it took to raise her g...

 One in three women experience their birth as traumatic. One in four struggle with perinatal mental health. Almost nobody talks about it.  Perinatal therapist Trina Grater joins us to explain matrescence, the developmental transition into motherhood that has been named since the 1970s and that most women have never heard of. She shares her own fast, unattended birth, why "at least your baby&a...

Angela Brown wasn't supposed to survive her second birthday. Diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at 18 months, she and her twin sister were sent home so their parents could "enjoy them" for six months. She's 49 now, a mother of eight and a grandmother and that miracle is only the first thing that happened to her. At seven, she was raped by a foster child living in her home, and told...

Emanuel Zevallos hit rock bottom in 2015 and found out the floor was solid. In this episode of the Irene Cares, Hope sits down with Emanuel Zevallos, energy healer, regression hypnotherapist, and founder of Compass Healing Center in St. George, Utah. Raised by two physicians including a mother who ran early immunotherapy trials while fighting cancer herself Emanuel came out of childhood abuse, two...

Roslyn was five years old the first time she watched her father hurt her mother. By six, he'd turned on her. By nine, she was the one raising her two baby brothers feeding them on an EBT card, walking them to school, skipping her own classes, keeping them alive while the adults disappeared. She was in ninth grade when she picked up the phone and told her friend's mom she couldn't do...

Sterling Brown is a therapist in St. George, Utah, on a mission to change how small-town Utah talks about mental health. He grew up skeptical of therapy himself, seeing it as awkward and even manipulative — until losing a classmate to suicide in high school shifted everything for him. In this episode, Sterling breaks down why rural Mountain West communities are hit so hard by the suicide epidemic,...

Lisa Renda spent her career as a psychotherapist teaching clients to heal — until a psychic warning, a divorce, a faith crisis, and raising a child with autism forced her to apply everything she knew to her own life. In this episode of Irene Cares, Lisa shares how she walked away from the old belief that trauma can only be managed, not healed, and how neuroplasticity, somatic work, and a life-chan...

Carol's son Dylan was 18 when a motorcycle accident took his life. In this episode, she opens up about the sound of grief she says she'll never get out of her brain, what it was like to sit with the not-knowing before the worst news arrived, and how a friendship forged through shared loss became one of the things that kept her standing. Carol also shares what she's learned about sho...

Ashley Larsen is both a registered dietitian and a personal trainer — a rare combination that gives her a uniquely balanced perspective on health. In this episode, she breaks down why she'd choose exercise over nutrition if she could only give someone one tool for better health, and how starting with movement naturally leads to better food choices instead of the other way around. Ashley unpac...

What do a Doomsday cult, rat poison, and a .357 revolver have in common? They're all part of one man's survival story — and none of them won. Raven is a lifelong musician, martial artist, and author who grew up in a cult, survived abuse at the hands of his stepfather, and spent years inviting death onto his own stage before driving to the woods one night with a loaded gun and one unanswe...

On the Irene Cares Podcast, Carrie Crane shares how early trauma, an emotionally unavailable and abusive home, and becoming a mother at 15 shaped lifelong patterns of seeking love, people-pleasing, and survival mode. She describes placing her second baby for adoption at 17, pursuing nursing to prove a principal wrong, and later recognizing destructive relationship cycles, including severe abuse an...

Veteran Tim Leavitt describes joining the Army National Guard at 17 while in foster care, deploying to Iraq at 18 as artillery, leaving in 2008, then reenlisting in 2009 as a combat engineer and completing two Afghanistan route-clearance deployments. He recounts the realities of combat versus movies, including difficulty seeing shooters, and details a Kunar Province 360 ambush where radio intercep...

Have you ever wondered why certain sounds, situations, or words send you spiraling — even when you're completely safe? You're not broken. You may be carrying invisible wounds. In this episode, Hope and De'dy open an honest, compassionate conversation about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder — what it actually is, what it isn't, and why so many people are living with it without ever...

Are you tired of saying yes when you mean no? Do you struggle to speak up for yourself without feeling guilty or afraid of conflict? In this episode, we're diving deep into the transformative skill of assertive communication — and how mastering it can change every area of your life. In this episode, you'll learn: ✅ The difference between assertiveness, aggression, and passivity — and wh...